The Last Straw

The last patches of snow, even in the most secluded gulches, had been licked up by the mounting sun; the waters of Coyote Creek had returned to the confines of the stream bed; i...

He stood on a bearskin rug before the blazing fire, hat in hand, boots polished, tall and trim with his handsome head bowed just a trifle. The blazing logs gave the only light t...

"Now about the men, Miss Hunter," said Hepburn. When he reached this subject he looked through the deep window far down the creek and had Jane known him better she might have se...

"No,"--deliberately, tracing a line on a rug with her toe and watching it critically--"I took his advice. You see, the men out here expect things from women that no one has ever...

Beck was still busy with the horses when Jane appeared, bareheaded and clad in a riding habit. He had separated the unbroken stock from the horses that had been turned loose for...

Jane Hunter was in work up to her trim elbows. She had little time for anything else. Twice again Dick Hilton came to see her, riding a horse in the second visit, but his stays...

At sunset a girl rider descended from the uplands into the shadows of Devil's Hole. The big brown which carried her picked his way slowly down the treacherous trail, nose low, e...

Three weeks after her arrival Jane made her first trip to town and Beck drove the pair of strong bays which swirled their buckboard over the road at a spanking trot.

Two-bits was the last into the bunkhouse the following evening. He had ridden his Nigger horse in from the westward hills and had not come through the big gate so not until he s...

While the men were eating that night another rider had come to H.C. He entered slowly, tied his horse to the fence and walked down along the cottonwoods toward the house. He sto...

If Dick Hilton had not been bewildered by passion, jealousy and rage at thwarted desires, he might have known that his horse was not taking the homeward way, and had the horse n...

"A man who goes after horse thieves is likely to run into trouble, ma'am. That is, if he gets close to 'em. He wouldn't let anybody go with him so I guess he figures he's compet...

The mountains which had been brown and saffron when Jane Hunter came to take possession of her ranch grew tinted with green as grasses sprouted under the coaxing sun. Pinons wer...

It was the Reverend who brought word of the fencing. He had made a circuit of the ranches, holding services and selling pens, and on his way back from the lower reaches of Coyot...

Hours later, after the Reverend had offered a strong, verbose prayer, invoking the wrath of the Almighty upon those who plot to strike from cover, after the bunk house had final...

"You're all there is to me," he told Jane the following morning with a desperation in his eyes and a seriousness in his voice that made her search his face with alarm. "I fought...

The fire in Webb's cook stove was not all that furnished warmth to the three men sitting about it that night, for they drank frequently from the bottle which, when not passing f...

In the days that followed you might have seen approaching from a distance a rider for the HC. Watching, you would have noticed that he stopped his horse, rode on, stopped again,...

The love that grew in the hearts of Tom Beck and Jane Hunter was not the only suit which approached a climax in the hills. Another existed, quite different, unknown to them, uns...

Webb was building biscuits and Hepburn was slicing a steak from the hind quarter of a carcass that a few days before had been an HC steer. McKee entered with an armful of wood....

The chuck wagon had gone, followed by the bed wagon and the cavet, the last made up of one hundred and forty saddle horses, stringing along the road, a solid column of horse fle...

Beck, with the Reverend, Curtis and two of the ranch hands preceded Jane to the Hole at dawn and when she rode down the trail she saw them on their horses, forming a little grou...

Throughout the day the sun beat into the canyon, its heat relieved by rare breezes of brief duration. What wind did come raised swirls of dust and rustled wilted foliage, for th...

Night had come upon the round-up camp, fires near the cook wagon were dying. On the rise to the southward the night-hawk sat with an eye on the saddle stock which grazed over a...

The outcropping which formed Cathedral Tank stood stark and saffron in the lap of the desert under the morning sun, flinging out slow waves of heat even at that early hour, as S...

It was a long ride from the HC to the round-up camp but the sorrel was not spared. The impulse that sent Jane Hunter through the last hours of darkness had only accumulated stre...

Jane found herself on the pinto racing through the night, ducking under cedars until she was clear of the timber, crashing through brush, leaping washes and at her side, silent,...

It was the first day that Tom Beck could lie on his back. For weeks he had lain on his face there in the living room of the ranch house, nursed back to health by Jane Hunter's g...